From Publishers Weekly
Recognized now as a peer of 17th-century masters Rembrandt and Vermeer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted notoriously provocative religious and classical tableaux, yet left few traces ("no letters, no table talk, no notebook or treatise") of his life beyond his art. Australian -born Robb, whose ex-pat tour-de-force Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel, & La Cosa Nostra took readers through that fascinating island, has created an idiosyncratic but dazzling biography of Caravaggio by exploiting almost every extant fragment, including a handful of sightings by friends and enemies, and the scanty Italian police files. More audaciously, Robb spreads through the life many pages on every known canvas, leaving appropriately theatrical description in his wake. Robb's Caravaggio--or "M," as he insists on calling the multimonikered and aliased painter--was a violent man of "hairtrigger touchiness," who fueled the passionate intensity of his painting with his professional and emotional frustrations, managing to register raw life in a religious culture that demanded, according to Robb, vapid holiness. Bisexual, he painted and loved pubescent boys, and patronized the female prostitutes he used as models. To great effect, Robb inserts reflections by the painter's contemporaries within his own sentences, offsetting them with italics rather than quotation marks: "M's repeated and humiliating requests for small advances from Masetti confirmed the need. That wasn't his style and he reddens whenever he sees me." He studs his own descriptions with odd words, obscenities and anachronistic, out-of-place contemporary references ("... like Ronald Reagan playing the cowboy"). Yet it all works--Robb's flawed, melodramatic, swollen biography is crammed with more about the dark, driven Caravaggio than any previous life. Just as Caravaggio took art to the edge, Robb takes biography there. 16 pages of illus., 8 in color, not seen by PW. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Of books about the art and life of the great Caravaggio, there are apparently no end. Unfortunately this comprehensive consideration of the master's life and oeuvre neither particularly expands our understanding nor further illuminates our appreciation. Attentive as he is to the immediate world around the artist, Robb's hostility to Catholicism and his insensibility to the religious content and emotion of Caravaggio's mature paintings vitiates not only the sometimes perceptive value of his analyses but also the quality of his contextual reconstruction. His evocation of qualities in the paintings are not always apparent and are at times dubiously inferred from problematic biographical data. Similarly troubling are his sexualization of the artist's content and the sometimes feverish conspiratorial nets that are educed from a limited body of documentation. "Caravaggesque" provocations, vulgarity, neologisms, colloquial jargon, Australian slang, and smart-alecky allusions mar the verve of Robb's prose. Collections desiring a contextual approach will be better served by Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life (LJ 6/1/99), while those concerned with accessible formal elucidation and comprehensive illustration will wish to acquire Catherine Puglisi's Caravaggio, LJ 4/1/99.---Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Hilary Spurling
...a book that recreates the mirror Caravaggio held up to nature with singular delicacy as well as passion and panache.


From Booklist
The painter now known as Caravaggio, but whose signature read Marisi and whom Robb refers to as M (which could stand for "mystery" given the dearth of facts about his life), has become a holy grail for art historians. The astonishing naturalism of M's work, his penetrating and empathic vision, inspires scholars to attempt to render his life with the same precision and respect. Robb's robust biography follows Helen Langdon's balanced study and charts its own path. Having evinced his passion for Italian history in his acclaimed Midnight in Sicily (1998), Robb energetically recreates M's repressive and brutal milieu, analyzes his "wild and strange" temperament, and offers a convincing theory about his puzzling death. His mettlesome assertions regarding M's ruthlessness, "hairtriggered touchiness," resiliency, and homosexuality, as well as his confident theories regarding his crimes and punishments, make for great narrative vitality and drama. Robb also reveals heretofore unknown aspects of M's miraculous techniques. Robb portrays M as a mythical and tragic figure blessed with almost supernatural artistic gifts and cursed with fatal flaws and a cruel and envious world. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
An exuberant attempt to penetrate the mysteries surrounding the astounding paintings and brief, turbulent life of the Italian artist who has come to be known as Caravaggio. As Robb (Midnight in Sicily, 1998) points out, even the painter's real name (probably Michelangelo Merisi) is a matter of conjecture, as is his birthplace (Robb opts for Milan). The name Caravaggio comes from a small town in which, according to tradition, the painter had been born, perhaps in 1571 or 1573. His end is as uncertain as his beginning: He disappeared in July, 1610, and was widely assumed to have been murdered, though his body was never discovered. So little known a figure would seem an unpromising subject for a biography. Yet out of the slender documentation, a close and often deeply convincing reading of Caravaggio's several dozen surviving paintings, and an admirable grasp of the hard realities of life in Italy during the violent expansion of the Counter-Reformation, Robb has written an account that is consistently gripping and generally persuasive. The painter would not seem at first to be a particularly sympathetic figure. He was, according to many who knew him, difficult, often contentious, and sometimes violent. It seems likely that he killed a man. Yet Robb makes a good case that ``M,'' as he calls him, was difficult at least in part to protect his artistic integrity, which produced revolutionary paintings that embraced harsh reality in a way more cautious painters avoided and the church condemned. Robb's readings of M's paintings, including such astonishing works as ``The Crucifixion of Saint Peter,'' ``The Beheading of John the Baptist,'' ``The Weeping Magdalen,'' and ``Mary Dead,'' are detailed, energetic, and convincing, as is his version of M's death. A compelling portrait of the painter as outsider and provocateur; a first-rate evocation of both a genius and the violent times in which he lived. (16 pages illus.) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

"There was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same." So wrote art critic Robert Hughes of one Michelangelo Merisi, known to some simply as M and to us as Caravaggio. As Peter Robb reminds us in his new book, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, sixteenth-century Italy was not known for its tolerance of iconoclasts, and the hard-living, scandal-generating M certainly was one. But he changed the art of painting in the course of his brief, violent life, a life that is ably captured in this insightful and entertaining volume.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

M threw out accepted technique and dogma to paint from life with dazzling clarity. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longings and the brutal realities of life with shocking frankness. M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio is strikingly different from the usual artist's life: The Times Literary Supplement writes, 'Its hero is wholly, richly alive.' With 'tremendous vigor, dash and swagger' Peter Robb evokes the seething and dangerous world of Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Caravaggio is seen as a provocateur to a culture riven by the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, Reformation, a background of ideological cold war against which, despite all odds and at great cost to their creators, brilliant feats of art and science were achieved.

M was imprisoned for criminal libel and saw his work rejected by Roman churches. A savage street fight nearly killed him and left his enemy bleeding to death. Later, with a price on his head, Caravaggio fled south to Naples and beyond, where he experienced four years of creative triumph and personal catastrophe. After being jailed in Malta for an unnamed crime, and pursued by killers through Sicily and Naples, he disappeared in the summer of 1610. Refuting standard accounts, Robb presents Caravaggio's death in a gripping scenario of sexual vendetta, betrayal, ambush and state collusion -- a startling conclusion to a groundbreaking book.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Recognized now as a peer of 17th-century masters Rembrandt and Vermeer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted notoriously provocative religious and classical tableaux, yet left few traces ("no letters, no table talk, no notebook or treatise") of his life beyond his art. Australian -born Robb, whose ex-pat tour-de-force Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel, & La Cosa Nostra took readers through that fascinating island, has created an idiosyncratic but dazzling biography of Caravaggio by exploiting almost every extant fragment, including a handful of sightings by friends and enemies, and the scanty Italian police files. More audaciously, Robb spreads through the life many pages on every known canvas, leaving appropriately theatrical description in his wake. Robb's Caravaggio--or "M," as he insists on calling the multimonikered and aliased painter--was a violent man of "hairtrigger touchiness," who fueled the passionate intensity of his painting with his professional and emotional frustrations, managing to register raw life in a religious culture that demanded, according to Robb, vapid holiness. Bisexual, he painted and loved pubescent boys, and patronized the female prostitutes he used as models. To great effect, Robb inserts reflections by the painter's contemporaries within his own sentences, offsetting them with italics rather than quotation marks: "M's repeated and humiliating requests for small advances from Masetti confirmed the need. That wasn't his style and he reddens whenever he sees me." He studs his own descriptions with odd words, obscenities and anachronistic, out-of-place contemporary references ("... like Ronald Reagan playing the cowboy"). Yet it all works--Robb's flawed, melodramatic, swollen biography is crammed with more about the dark, driven Caravaggio than any previous life. Just as Caravaggio took art to the edge, Robb takes biography there. 16 pages of illus., 8 in color, not seen by PW. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Of books about the art and life of the great Caravaggio, there are apparently no end. Unfortunately this comprehensive consideration of the master's life and oeuvre neither particularly expands our understanding nor further illuminates our appreciation. Attentive as he is to the immediate world around the artist, Robb's hostility to Catholicism and his insensibility to the religious content and emotion of Caravaggio's mature paintings vitiates not only the sometimes perceptive value of his analyses but also the quality of his contextual reconstruction. His evocation of qualities in the paintings are not always apparent and are at times dubiously inferred from problematic biographical data. Similarly troubling are his sexualization of the artist's content and the sometimes feverish conspiratorial nets that are educed from a limited body of documentation. "Caravaggesque" provocations, vulgarity, neologisms, colloquial jargon, Australian slang, and smart-alecky allusions mar the verve of Robb's prose. Collections desiring a contextual approach will be better served by Helen Langdon's Caravaggio: A Life (LJ 6/1/99), while those concerned with accessible formal elucidation and comprehensive illustration will wish to acquire Catherine Puglisi's Caravaggio, LJ 4/1/99. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/99.]--Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Spurling - The New York Times Book Review